Dancing at the Edge of the World:
Ritual, Community and the Middle Eastern Dancer

by Andrea Deagon

The oriental dancer stands at the crux of many
conflicting images, both traditionally in the Arab world and in the Western
world today. One such conflict is between the dancer’s purely sensual element
and her aspect as a sacred being. In the 1970s, when popular and scholarly into
oriental dance was in its early days in the United States, some of this
discussion took the form of inquiries into “origins” of the dance: Was it
originally a birth ritual or a “dance to please the sultan”; were the “original”
belly dancers prostitutes or priestesses? Such arguments seem naive now.
Anthropologists and scholars of ethnic history have shown the limitations of
trying to explain a cultural phenomenon by seeking simplified historical
origins. Culture has always been complex, and there is no reason to assume that
the “meaning” of oriental dance has ever been more simple in the past than it is
today.
Yet the tension between the dancer’s sacred and
profane aspects still exists. There can be no doubt that dance has been
traditionally associated with prostitution in the Middle East. The first
European traveler’s accounts of Middle Eastern dance describe the dancers as
prostitutes primarily, and while the Europeans probably undervalued the dancers’
roles as entertainers and artists because of their own cultural prejudices,
their observations must be essentially correct. Throughout the Mediterranean and
Asia, from the hetaira of ancient Greece to the geisha of Japan,
prostitutes of the highest and lowest classes have often been dancers (and
musicians and singers) of the highest and lowest classes. While the overlap
between the roles varies, they are firmly connected. Consequently, it is not
surprising that in the Arab world, dancers’ morals are by definition
questionable; dance and prostitution (or at the very least, culturally
unacceptable sexual moves) are still often linked, both in people’s minds and in
reality.
Yet dance also has sacred and communally crucial
functions. This is apparent in ritual dances such as guedra, in which an
entranced female dancer is the focus of a community ritual; or the zar, in
which mainly female - guides, through trance, oversee the healing of female
patients. At weddings and other occasions, oriental dancers too serve vital
communal functions in their performances which represent both fertility and
sexuality. While most professional dancers lack status within communities, some
are revered because their performances embody crucial experiences associated
with a feminine and sacred power at odds with patriarchal values.
The tension between sacred and sensual, and the
view of dancers that causes them to be scorned and revered, seem strange and
contradictory. In fact, a wider view of ritual and community reveals that such
tensions are common throughout human society, and indeed the people most
necessary in structuring a group’s self-image and sense of community are often
defined as outsiders by ethnicity, sexuality, and social status.

The Nature of Ritual

Although there are many possible definitions of “ritual,” most anthropologists
would agree that a ritual is a performance act which defines communal values
through a system of symbols and/or expresses and resolves tensions within the
community. In other words, rituals consist of actions. Some element of
these actions is symbolic. On a deep level these symbolic actions reflect
communal values and concerns and promote communal solidarity and individual
satisfaction within the community. Monotheistic, philosophically- and
legally-oriented religions such as Islam and Christianity, which have replaced
earlier polytheistic religions, have had the effect over time of removing or
diminishing the narrative and overtly sacred meanings from some community
rituals. As a result, we tend to perceive differences between, on he one hand,
dances felt as experiential, religious, and connected auth the spirit world,
often through trance (e.g. zikr, guedra); and, on the other, dances felt
as social and hinging on community elations (e.g. hagallah, tahtib) . All
the same, most folk dances are, anthropologically speaking, “rituals,” in that
through symbolic action, community ties are explored and strengthened.
By these criteria, the hagallah is a good
example of a social ritual lance. While it is not “religious,” it occurs at
specific communally important occasions (weddings), plays out social dynamics,
and has a symbolic system which resonates with a wider world view. An important
aspect of this symbolic system is its representation of masculine and feminine
within the community. The men of the family/community clap and sing together
emphasizing their solidarity and establishing the active and dominant context of
the dance/world as masculine and group-oriented: A microcosm of the public
world. The presence of the group of women is essential but as background to the
event.
The dancer, though, the central element of the
experience, is female. In a social context, the dancer is often a member of the
bride’s family, and women may take turns playing the central role. On the other
hand, the woman may also be a professional dancer (1) Barbara Siegel has
observed that the employment of professional dancers has diminished the
importance of ordinary women in these ritual occasions, an unfortunate effect of
urbanization. (2)
On the other hand, whatever the actual social
ramifications, the symbolic system of the dance is essentially the same whoever
performs it. The dancer is veiled, obscuring her identity and individuality, but
at the same time enabling her to represent a higher power or more universal
image of woman as bountiful giver. The gift is not without struggle: The dance
is rivalrous and playful, with men and dancer luring and challenging one
another. The woman may dance with a stick, and dances are described in which she
holds a sword or a rifle, sometimes striking the young men who get too close. On
one level, this is a playful, good natured appropriation of masculine martial
power, as the raks al assaya so often is today. On a deeper level, she
embodies the vagaries of chance: As the men contend with her, she favors or
thwarts them, the world wielding a sword or a stick Looking further, the stick
becomes a concrete symbol of the ability to bestow or withhold blessings: An
assumption of the kind of temporal and metaphysical power invested in such
symbols as the king’s scepter, the shepherd’s crook, the magic wand, the poet’s
staff. The dancer may remove and bestow her jewelry on individual men (to
reclaim it later), a sign of benevolence toward them; likewise the men may throw
down their tobs in front of her as a sign of bravado, respect, and as an attempt
to gain her favor, all in one. The dance may have its roots in a woman’s dance
to choose a mate, but more likely this explanation is a folk-historical
reconstruction of a reason for the hagallah’s matriarchal substructure.
The dancer embodies the universal woman, the earth and its ability to give or
withdraw favor from her community.
The hagallah is a manifestation of a
common structure for celebratory dancing in the Middle East: A male audience
receives and interacts with a female dancer. The audience may be mixed, but
masculine participation is tore- grounded. Ordinary women are the dancers in
some circumstances, but professional dancers have traditionally had a vital role
in communal rituals, particularly those involving major life transitions, i.e.
weddings and births. Edward Lane, writing in 1835, notes that “on the morning
after [a] birth, two or three of the dancing-men called Khawals, or two
or three Ghazeeyehs, dance in front of the house, or in the court.” While
the tradition of professional dancing at births has faded, the practice of
hiring professional dancers for weddings is now so widespread that it needs no
comment.
How is it that an outsider or someone associated
with non-traditional accomplishments can take such a central role in rituals
that establish both family values and community concerns? How is it that
dancers, as disreputable as some Ghawazee, are essential a weddings,
where maintenance of feminine morality is so much an issue? Why do dancers have
the ability to represent what is deepest in the Arab soul, while following
lifestyles that are at odds with traditional aspirations? Becausein a
ritual setting it is very often precisely the “outsider” who is responsible for
defining community values and communal solidarity.

Liminality and Communitas

Rituals almost always involve some form of liminality, or evocation of
the boundaries of spiritual and material states. Some rituals are specifically
limimal, e.g. weddings, which focus on the bride’s liminal passage from
childhood into her adult sexuality. Others invoke liminality for other purposes,
e.g. the zar, when the afflicted woman must enter a liminal
trance state in order to come to terms with her possessing the demon. In some
ritual performances, such as a zikr, the trance state of the
practitioners heightens the audience’s awareness of the sacred world, giving
them a vicarious experience of liminality. All rituals involve some degree of
liminality, since rituals are essentially incursions into sacred territory.
In all societies, some people are better than
others at entering this space, or at insuring community participation in it.
Across many cultures, these people tend to have some things in common. Christian
priests to dervishes to shamanic healers, to traveling bards of ancient Greece
and Ireland, to court jester and village idiot, to the dancer/prostitute, all
exist along the same continuum. Usually they are not full participants in the
production economy of the local community, and are supported by that community
because of their access to other experiential states. Many are defined as
different by their ethnic origin (usually not mainstream religious leaders, but
frequently entertainers and charismatic religious leaders). Sexuality and gender
identity may be different as well; e.g. in ancient Rome, the priests of
Cybele were eunuchs. Many religious traditions require chastity of their
leaders. In India prostitutes were associated with many temples.
The Ghawazee, Khawals, and other public
dancers clearly fit into this pattern. They may claim different ethnic origins.
They follow unusual patterns of gender behavior, with women taking on masculine
leadership (Lane comments that the males of the Ghawazee are subject to
their wives), and the Khawals mimicking female behavior. Their morality
is openly different from that of the mainstream. These are people whose
lifestyles make them lirninal by their very nature, and thus vital for defining
communal identity.
Communal identity, according to anthropologist
Victor Turner, has two essential forms. “This first is of society as a
structured, differentiated and often hierarchical system of
politico-legal-eco-nomic positions…”. . .“ This is the normal world, in which we
must be aware of our status and the status of others, and behave accordingly.
But contrasting this is the state of communitas, an unstructured
awareness of fellow-feeling and commonality, “which emerges recognizably in a
liminal period... it is a matter of giving recognition to an essential and
generic bond, without which there could be no society.”
It is this sense of communitas that the
“outsider” or person of liminal status is able to create. Turner observes,
“Members of despised or outlawed ethnic and cultural groups [e.g. the
good Samaritan] play major roles in myths and popular tales as representatives
or expressions of universal human values.” Such folktales are paralleled by
ritual structures. The experience of shared communality, where status markers
lose significance in the light of fellow-feeling, is most often invoked by
someone of liminal status.
In the hagallah, the female dancer, when
she is a member of the community, assumes a liminal status when she abandons
both her individual identity and her feminine reticence in order to embody a
larger power. In other circumstances, a dancer whose lifestyle marks her as
marginal to the community, performs, an in so doing, creates the feeling of
communitas. The oriental dancer today whether an actual foreigner or a local
girl, whether defined as a “star” or as a “whore,” is an outsider within her
community, who has the potential to create communitas.

Repression and Liminality

Laws codify not the behaviors that are expected of everyone, but the behaviors
that exemplify the public morals of the mainstream. Societies periodically
misread themselves, taking their laws and moral precepts literally with terrible
results for their own cultural integrity. The exile of the Ghawazee from
Cairo in 1834, and the execution of some who defied the ban is a clear example
of this as is the fundamentalist struggle to repress oriental dance today. In
terms of cultural dynamics, societies set themselves rigid limits in part to
create outsiders that they need to consolidate the whole community. Without a
class of outsiders the rituals most vital to a society’s integrity cannot be
preserved. Typically, the many of the people most vital to a culture, notably
its artists and writers, are excluded from the moral and social mainstream.
The oriental dancer of today is clearly the
heiress of this-network of ritual and symbolic structures. It is not
“perversity” of the Arab mentality that defines the dancer as morally
questionable while at the same time welcoming her at weddings and all kinds of
community and family celebrations. This is how culture maintains itself – by
preserving the vital role of “outsider” within itself. Public pressure insures
that only exceptional women, or women who follow the pattern of sexual
difference, will pursue the path of professional dance. As a result, sensual
wildness remains embodied in the dancer, and retains its power to move audiences
to the heights of communal feeling. The best of the oriental dancers are able to
create in their audiences this sense of communitas, bringing them to the
borderlands where the world of the flesh merges with the world of the spirit,
and the boundaries of the soul dissolve into a community without limits.

Footnotes
1) Or, in the case of a kaf observed by Magda Salehin 1978, a woman with an
unusual positson within the community: The unmarried schoolteacher. Magda Saleh,
Egypt Dances (film), New York University. 1979; idem. lecture at Fazil’s Dance
Studio, New York, June23. 1993.

4) Observed many
times; described and filmed by Safeh in Egypt Dances, the main source for my
description; also note a 1927 description by Winifred S. BIackman (The Fellahin
of Upper Egypt, London: Frank Case & Co Ltd., 1927 (1). p. 93), at a wedding
where possibly the dance was performed by the women with no men present; in
which case the symbolism is still there, but without specific gender reference:
The same images received by a different community.

5)Magda Saleh, A
Documentation of the Ethnic Dance Traditions of the Arab Republic 01 Egypt. New
York University, 1979, pp. 43-71.

6) There may also
be more than one dancer, but in any case, far fewer dancers than men. In some
circumstances, a khawal may substitute for the female dancer, but I believe
these circumstances are less likely to involve the sods of ritual interaction
between men and dancer that characterize the hagallah.

7) Edward William
Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. The Hague
and London: East-West Publications, 1836 (1978), p. 497.

8) The wild
parties and sexual experiences provided by prostitutes and considered
inappropriate in mainstream life, are “other experiential states” of a sort, as
are religious insight, poetic ability, and the idiot’s world perception.

9) The Ghawazee do
claim different ethnic origins from other Egyptians, though this clam has been
doubted, khawals are associated with the Ghawazee and may share their claim to
different blood. Lane also comments in boy dancers known as ginks. who were
foreign, and not Muslim, and were scorned as prostitutes — though given the
dynamics of the entertainment/prostitution network when Lane was writing, I
would suggest that the distinction was not always dear. (Lane, p. 377) lii this
centwy, some ordeazy street dancers called themselves Ghawazee, whether or not
they were really of that background; so the claim of ethnic distinction may have
had some idporlance in one’s legitimacy as a dancer.

13)1 would argue
that communitas has “high” forms, such as the benevolent fellow- feeling that
can happen with sublime dancers but also has “Iowa’ forms, such as the all- male
parties entertained by dancer-prostitotes, where there may well be a sense of
extraordinary fellowship among the men.

This article was
originally published in Arabesque, Sept.-Oct. 1994.

Andrea Deagon received her Ph.D. in
Classical Studies from Duke Unviersity in 1984. Since then she has taught
at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) and at her undergraduate alma
mater, Guilford College (Greensboro, NC) before coming to UNC-Wilmington, where
she coordinates the Classical Studies Program and teaches in the Women's Studies
Program. She has studied oriental dance since age 17, and has had a wide
range of performing experiences in the US and (opportunistically) overseas.
She periodically teaches local classes and regional seminars. One of her
goals over the past ten years has been the integration of her academic research
and writing, with her goals and perceptions as a dancer. These articles
are a part of that process.

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